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Mycelia Board Game Review

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Outback Crossing Review

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18 Oct 2019 09:34 #302567 by charlest
Yes, exactly Dave. The guy I was playing with is my Netrunner partner and I would have much rather spent our two player time playing that.

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18 Oct 2019 09:50 - 18 Oct 2019 09:51 #302568 by Vysetron
The 2p game question in particular is an interesting one. We all have our favorites that we've played loads of times, and it's really hard to justify playing a new one over those. Yet it's undeniable that familiarity is part of what makes those favorite games work so well. The question is, do you risk wasting plays to see if a new game is actually great or not?

Related, my wife and I have been playing Unmatched. She didn't like her first two games at all but something about it had her wanting to revisit. Now that we're several games in and know what everyone does the game's gotten way better. There's mind games, meta decisions, and it really sings. We almost didn't give it that chance but I'm glad we did.

Is The North worth it? Dunno. Haven't played. But maybe!
Last edit: 18 Oct 2019 09:51 by Vysetron.
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18 Oct 2019 21:23 #302576 by Ah_Pook
My wife and I love Galaxy Trucker , but hasn't played it for a long time. The base game gets pretty samey after you play it enough times. A friend had the first expansion in shrink and sold it to me in the cheap, and we tried it out tonight. Harder cards, more ship parts, new ship types... Yea it's a great expansion. Galaxy Trucker remains awesome.
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20 Oct 2019 11:35 #302601 by hotseatgames
Nemesis hit the table for the first real time last night. We had 4 players. One of the players is known for taking crazy actions in games just to see what happens; a true agent of chaos. True to form, on TURN 1 he started the self-destruct sequence on the ship. Everyone else at the table was like.... seriously? He of course had his secret reasons. For my part, I had to "send the signal" back to Corporate and escape / hibernate WITH an Intruder egg.

We all spread out, exploring the ship. One player attempted to shut down the self-destruct sequence and check ship coordinates while myself and one other checked the engines. That player failed to shut down the sequence... the ship would blow up in 3 turns, for sure. This meant hibernation was not an option; it's escape pod or nothing. There were 3 escape pods on the ship, and four players. Each pod can hold two people, IF the first person in doesn't immediately launch.

Exploring the ship was a bigger task than intended... the two rooms that let you access escape pods were literally the last 2 rooms discovered. I had found the alien Nest, but couldn't obtain an egg because an Intruder was in there with me. I was out of ammunition, badly wounded, and running out of time. Even traversing the ship before explosion would be difficult, and I still didn't have an egg. I had at least managed to send the signal, remotely, thanks to my skill at using computers (I was the Scientist). I futilely punched the alien until it eviscerated me. A turn prior, one other player had also been shredded while trying to make it to an escape pod.

Meanwhile, the villain who started this whole mess had actually made it into a pod, but he was just sitting there, not launching. We would find out why soon....

The last remaining player had a SHRED of a chance to actually make it onto a pod. He was surrounded by aliens and had few cards left in his hand. It would require a supreme act of luck but I was actually rooting for him since it would have been an epic victory of sorts. Earlier, he had actually defeated the Queen, drawing the only lucky card that would kill it with two wounds. He was also later torn to pieces, and the chaos player launched the escape pod to victory. His goal? To be the only survivor.

One player, who highly over-values winning in games, was not crazy about the game. It has a LOT of luck-based elements to it, and in general, every turn makes your situation go from bad to worse. Survival should not be expected. The winner liked it a LOT, and I also like it. I think it tells great stories, and if you are playing this one as some high strategy title, you are doing it wrong. This is for fans of things like Psycho Raiders, which is probably why the more "strategy" minded people in my group weren't as keen on it.

Still, they agreed that it was hard to form a true opinion since this was their first time and the game was essentially cut in half from the start by the self-destruct sequence. It will hit the table again in two weeks. We will see.

We finished the night by trying the team mode of The King is Dead. This was the first time any of us had played the game outside of its peak state, which is three players. With 4, you divide into 2 teams of 2 and you can't discuss strategy with your teammate. My teammate ended up being Mr. Chaos from the Nemesis game. He spent most of the game falling asleep and forgetting the victory condition, and we lost. I continue to think you should only play this game with 3.
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21 Oct 2019 14:58 #302618 by barrowdown
We played through Exit: The Haunted Roller Coaster. Like The House of Riddles, this was also very easy. If you are experienced at this series, both of these are not worth the price of entry. They are both very linear, provide lots of hand holding (or just tell you how to solve it), and avoid difficult puzzles. Haunted Roller Coaster is the better of the two because it has a couple interesting puzzle ideas even though they are offset by the ease of solving. This is a disappointment after the excellent two-part The Catacombs of Horror, which was the only release last wave.

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21 Oct 2019 17:39 #302629 by Erik Twice
I've been thinking about Roads & Boats since I played. I think I'll get it because I liked the game so much. I'm a bit afraid of not playing it with other people or getting "too good" by playing it solo and then not being able to play with others but I really want it.

I played Brass Lancashire again. It's a great game but it's true there are a couple issues or dominant strategies that run through it. Double rails are extremely strong and being able to beat unsuspecting players by getting loans at the end of the canal era and then spamming isn't much fun. Not having many real options on the last few turns of the game is also fairly annoying

In that sense, Birgimham is more fun. Sure, it's not as tight and it may have its own dominant strategies but it has more going for it. Not that it is a competition, I think both are good and pretty much different scenarios not unlike additional maps for Steam are.

D-Day Dice is weird. It's a cooperative Yathzee-like game with a WW2 theme. I don't know what to make it other than it was hard.

March of the Ants remains a great game and the best 4x in the market. The mechanics are great, but the cards really push it to the next level. All the evolutions are interesting, fun and lead to interesting gameplay. They are all rules-breaks, like being able to fly, exploding to deal damage to other ants or gaining VP by harvesting your own larvae (!). I'm a big supporter of this game and I think there are plenty of good reasons to be.

I've done like 14 drafts of Throne of Eldraine on Magic: The Gathering Arena. That's more boosters than I've ever opened in real life. The format is ok. There are a couple well-defined archetypes which is fun, but games just drag on an stalemate and some cards can be quite nasty (that Inkeeper is busted). Food (2, tap, gain 3 life) is a terrible mechanic that has been developed to the point you do interesting things about, but it remains terrible by not having a real purporse in-game. treasures and specially clues are much better designs. Not bad, but I miss Dominaria.

PD: Questing Beast is the ugliest, most pushed design in the history of Magic.

--

Also, while not a boardgame I've started the first session of my first D&D campaign and hence my first "real" RPG campaign. We are using a module called Mines of Phandelver which I'm told is a well-known starter adventure. It was ok. I felt the game was pretty slow. In retrospective, using a grid was not worth the time for its gameplay value (Two in front, two in the back doesn't require a grid).

I'm playing a bard so that might have been part of it: Having spent all my spells on the first combat I didn't have enough for the second and mostly durdled around. That's not very fun and by the time I could roleplay I was feeling a bit tired and didn't take advantage of it. That said, I may have gone expecting a much more social game while I can assure you that my team is composed exclusively of murderhobos. Too much torture and needless murder for my taste.

D&D feels old-fashioned in that it has initiative rolls and very large dice spreads. I can't compare to other games because I've only played a couple VtM, GURPS and CoC one shots.
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21 Oct 2019 18:39 - 21 Oct 2019 18:41 #302635 by RobertB

Erik Twice wrote: Also, while not a boardgame I've started the first session of my first D&D campaign and hence my first "real" RPG campaign. We are using a module called Mines of Phandelver which I'm told is a well-known starter adventure. It was ok. I felt the game was pretty slow. In retrospective, using a grid was not worth the time for its gameplay value (Two in front, two in the back doesn't require a grid).

I'm playing a bard so that might have been part of it: Having spent all my spells on the first combat I didn't have enough for the second and mostly durdled around. That's not very fun and by the time I could roleplay I was feeling a bit tired and didn't take advantage of it. That said, I may have gone expecting a much more social game while I can assure you that my team is composed exclusively of murderhobos. Too much torture and needless murder for my taste.

D&D feels old-fashioned in that it has initiative rolls and very large dice spreads. I can't compare to other games because I've only played a couple VtM, GURPS and CoC one shots.


I just started myself (played D&D 2.0 once, about 40 years ago so that probably shouldn't count), and my daughter is DM'ing that very same campaign. She could be wrong, but she says you can try to incapacitate rather than kill, if you ask before each attack.

I'm probably one of those murder hobos of which you speak. Some tied-up NPC got lippy during an interrogation and I got sick of his crap and stuffed a sword in his eye. 'Neutral good' is on my sheet, but too much killing stuff on the PC might have made me a tad bit bloodthirsty WRT the mobs.
Last edit: 21 Oct 2019 18:41 by RobertB.

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21 Oct 2019 20:16 #302637 by Erik Twice
You can indeed non-lethal hits. However the issue was less than and more my party capturing enemies and torturing them to get information, killing them afterwards. They were goblins but geez. I also think that's an evil act even if the creatures are evil themselves.

Truth to be told, I just don't like murdering sentinent beings because. Part of it is personal, part of it is my experience with VtM and part of it is reading too much of the Order of the Stick and thinking Redcloak is kind of right.
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21 Oct 2019 21:40 - 21 Oct 2019 21:40 #302639 by Sagrilarus

barrowdown wrote: Played a second game of Scythe with my game group. I know we are a few years behind. I feel the game is firmly "okay". Nothing about it is super engaging or interesting, but it also has no real flaws. It just kind of happens and is very pretty to look at on the table. I would not turn down a game if others wanted to play, but I also do not feel I must get it to the table. As one of the players said, it never feels like you do anything because of how incremental the turns are. The map is too open with how limited movement is and combat always feels like checking a box on a list instead of gaining something. I would much rather play Cyclades in the same amount of time.


Yeah, that nails it. Scythe is the luke warm water of gaming.
Last edit: 21 Oct 2019 21:40 by Sagrilarus.
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21 Oct 2019 23:05 #302642 by Josh Look
I’ve actually come around on it and enjoy it quite a bit. Some of my group has, too, but those that haven’t are keeping it from being played.

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22 Oct 2019 08:37 #302646 by Vysetron
I gotta talk at y'all about Unmatched. I've now played it somewhere in the teens of times and it's continued to improve, to the point that I'm starting to think this is really something special.

My experience with Unmatched thus far has felt a lot like learning a traditional fighting game, think Street Fighter. The first couple games will have you learning. Not the rules, those could fit on a notecard, but the decks and what each character is capable of. Once you figure out what everyone can do you can start playing your own game effectively. Then when you've wrangled your strategies and can execute on a gameplan without much cognitive load, you're actually playing the game.

A lot of skirmish games don't get this far, not because they aren't played enough, but because the combat itself tends to be really simple. Warhammer Underworlds is a fantastic game but its thinky bits are largely frontloaded into deck construction and setup; you end up hucking dice in order to get things done and there's not a lot for mitigation. Funkoverse is that but even more so. Wildlands kind of tried to make combat more engaging but ended up being a snoozefest throughout (Barnes says Dredd is better, it might be). But Unmatched's combat being simultaneous reveals of chosen cards in a skirmish engine gives it teeth far beyond what most games in the genre offer.

An example. I was playing Alice VS Medusa. Medusa's a personal favorite but we opted to swap. I managed to get some momentum, leaving her with few cards in hand and some particularly juicy ones in mine. One of the best, Looking Glass, only works on defense but gives Alice a ton of benefits. All I had to do was move in and swing. My opponent's on her last action. Rather than maneuver and retreat, she attacks.

This does not compute. She's going to be out of options, and Looking Glass will let me basically teleport next to her for a beatdown on my turn. I throw the card down and prepare to wreck shop. And then she reveals a Feint.

Every character has copies of Feint. It's a simple card with small numbers, but crucially it blanks the text on the other person's card. It's primarily a defensive tool to stop ridiculous combos from happening. But she, knowing that I was probably looking for an opportunity to chain-yank her, read me like a book and baited my best defensive option out effortlessly with a move that I never would have considered had I been in that position. Sure it didn't do damage, but my entire next turn was basically voided by literally feinting an offense.

There are moments like this every play and every character offers varied choices to the point that you're inevitably going to find a favorite. There isn't another game doing what Unmatched does right now, and certainly not as elegantly. You really should play it, ideally several times.
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22 Oct 2019 10:11 #302649 by barrowdown

Josh Look wrote: I’ve actually come around on it and enjoy it quite a bit. Some of my group has, too, but those that haven’t are keeping it from being played.


I'm not sure why I would play it over Cyclades. It takes about the same amount of time, but it is so much livelier. I'm using Cyclades as my corollary because the game exists in a similar space to me (albeit with more encouragement of direct conflict).

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22 Oct 2019 13:06 - 22 Oct 2019 13:12 #302661 by Josh Look
Because they’re entirely different games. Yeah, they both have dudes that occasionally fight but one runs on an auction and the other is runs on a slick action selection system. If you want to play Cyclades, cool, do that.

Me, I’ve played Cyclades into the ground. I’d love to find a great DOAM game with modern mechanics. So far, Scythe and Lords of Hellas come closest to what I want.
Last edit: 22 Oct 2019 13:12 by Josh Look.

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22 Oct 2019 14:01 #302667 by Gary Sax
You don't think those games are close enough in genre to compare, Josh?

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22 Oct 2019 14:32 - 22 Oct 2019 14:33 #302670 by Josh Look
Not at all. Its like that whole TI vs Eclipse thing I’m always going on about. They don’t share that many mechanisms, they really should not be compared.

I tend to not group games together by anything but mechanisms. Just about everything else is superficial window dressing. Two games might be area control or DOAM, that’s fine as nothing more than a starting point, but that’s not what’s important. How they get to where they’re going is what interests me. I have Cyclades, but I also have Scythe, Lords of Hellas, Tyrants of the Underdark, Nexus Ops, etc. The AC/DOAM isn’t what I’m looking at, it’s that one is action selection, one is an auction, one is a deck builder, and so on.
Last edit: 22 Oct 2019 14:33 by Josh Look.
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